‘All have a place in God’s imaret’: Nostalgic visions of religious coexistence in contemporary Greek popular historical fiction

TY - ABST

T1 - ‘All have a place in God’s imaret’

T2 - Nostalgia. Loss and Creativity Political and Cultural Representations of the Past in South East Europe

AU - Willert, Trine Stauning

PY - 2013/12/11

Y1 - 2013/12/11

N2 - 200.000 Muslims live in Athens but the city has no official mosque for believers to carry out their religious rituals. Makeshift mosques function in basements and abandoned garages and several have been targets of racist violence. Since 1999, when the city prepared for the 2004 Olympic Games, the building of a state-funded mosque has been debated in the public sphere with the loudest voices being nationalistic and ethno-religious protests against a mosque. Parallel to these expressions of religious intolerance several popular historical novels in the mid- and late 2000s have treated the issue of religious co-existence in the Ottoman period where churches and mosques functioned side by side. These novels describe friendships, erotic relationships and conversions across cultural, linguistic and religious boundaries suggesting the existence of a common religious or spiritual awareness with the idea of God as a unifying feature in pre-national Ottoman communities. Placing these historical novels in relation to earlier Greek literature on the Ottoman period, the paper analyses three representative novels (Christopoulos 2005, Themelis 2008 and Kalpouzos 2008) covering the geographical areas of Epirus, Macedonia, the Black Sea region, Thrace and Asia Minor. The novels take place over long time spans from the mid nineteenth century to the dawn of the twenty-first century, implying deep societal changes brought about by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the effects of modernization. Central in the novels is religious co-existence symbolized by specific religious artifacts, a double-religious amulet, an imaret, a controversial manuscript from the time of the Fall of Constantinople. The narratives end with the change of governance in the homelands of the main characters, who are forced to move. The migration causes nostalgia – or repression - of what is lost but the religious artifacts remain as bonds to the past. The paper suggests that that the nostalgic remembrance of religious co-existence and the persistence of cross-religious symbols in the novels function as proposals for a fruitful dealing with religious diversity in contemporary Greek society in disapproval of the growing intolerance.

AB - 200.000 Muslims live in Athens but the city has no official mosque for believers to carry out their religious rituals. Makeshift mosques function in basements and abandoned garages and several have been targets of racist violence. Since 1999, when the city prepared for the 2004 Olympic Games, the building of a state-funded mosque has been debated in the public sphere with the loudest voices being nationalistic and ethno-religious protests against a mosque. Parallel to these expressions of religious intolerance several popular historical novels in the mid- and late 2000s have treated the issue of religious co-existence in the Ottoman period where churches and mosques functioned side by side. These novels describe friendships, erotic relationships and conversions across cultural, linguistic and religious boundaries suggesting the existence of a common religious or spiritual awareness with the idea of God as a unifying feature in pre-national Ottoman communities. Placing these historical novels in relation to earlier Greek literature on the Ottoman period, the paper analyses three representative novels (Christopoulos 2005, Themelis 2008 and Kalpouzos 2008) covering the geographical areas of Epirus, Macedonia, the Black Sea region, Thrace and Asia Minor. The novels take place over long time spans from the mid nineteenth century to the dawn of the twenty-first century, implying deep societal changes brought about by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the effects of modernization. Central in the novels is religious co-existence symbolized by specific religious artifacts, a double-religious amulet, an imaret, a controversial manuscript from the time of the Fall of Constantinople. The narratives end with the change of governance in the homelands of the main characters, who are forced to move. The migration causes nostalgia – or repression - of what is lost but the religious artifacts remain as bonds to the past. The paper suggests that that the nostalgic remembrance of religious co-existence and the persistence of cross-religious symbols in the novels function as proposals for a fruitful dealing with religious diversity in contemporary Greek society in disapproval of the growing intolerance.

M3 - Conference abstract for conference

Y2 - 11 December 2013 through 13 December 2013

ER -